Every Monday on Global Comment, we share the slow, thoughtful, considerate words that our brains – and souls – need but that it’s easy to miss in our busy world. We distil the best of the web and recommend just three links every week that you absolutely must see.
No fluff, no fuss, just three exceptional reads.
Here are this week’s recommendations:
Beer ban, Beckham and a vagina stadium: the World Cup in inglorious technicolor (Marina Hyde / Guardian)
Even someone as electrifyingly articulate as David Beckham is reduced to promoting Doha by claiming “it’s one of the best spice markets I’ve ever been to”. Surely not better than the Say You’ll Be There video, the spice market where he chose his wife? (And which, coincidentally, was also desert-based.) Unfortunately, the only thing anyone now wants to hear from Beckham is an answer to the question “how much money is enough?”. Some estimates place his Qatar promotional fee at £150m over 10 years, which is about £12m for every hour he did earning PR points in the queue for the late Queen’s lying-in-state. Cynical? Hey – it’s not me who’s a self-marketed metrosexual whose family wealth was recently estimated at £425m, yet who somehow wants even more cash from a regime that imprisons and brutalises gay people.
‘If You Can’t Exclude Someone, Do You Even Own It?’ (Molly Osberg / Curbed)
The rise of the pissed-off small landlord is complicated by how vanishingly rare the small landlord seems to be. The average New York landlord owns nearly 900 units, according to an analysis by the housing nonprofit JustFix. But a maze of LLCs makes an objective determination of ownership data nearly impossible: A small landlord could be a single person; it could also be a subsidiary of a massive company that owns a single home. So the owner-resident renting out the other five units in their building may very well feel besieged by uncooperative tenants and progressive rent laws, but they could just as easily blame their large corporate counterparts for the crunch. Small property owners are a shrinking minority in an economy that favors the deep-pocketed and in a landscape where buying and renting property is as much about securing cyclical returns on investment as providing a stable place to live. (When single-family homes run as a business do go under, they are increasingly likely to be scooped up by institutional investors.) It’s also difficult to definitively quantify landlords’ net losses or gains. Publicly available information on the business of being a New York City landlord is mostly limited to what New York City landlords find fit to share. Affordable-housing researchers and development organizations have long criticized landlords for significantly overstating the losses they would incur by making necessary structural or even cosmetic repairs.
On being accused of grooming (Courtney Act)
@thecourtneyact.archives To be clear, Courtney , a much respected and loved broadcaster , read an age appropriate story about a girl searching for the perfect party outfit. That’s it. That’s the whole story. . #courtneyact #dragqueen ♬ original sound – Kate
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Image: Kevin Young